Distant Palaces

by Abilio Estevez

  On the bus, Victorio recovers his serenity. It is filled with exhausted people. The heat might be infernal, but Victorio experiences the happiness of having freed himself from a great danger. He doesn’t mind the elbows shoving him, the terrible smell of sweat, the disturbing, awkward silence of everyone traveling on the bus, all holding on to the metal pipes as if they were grasping their last remote hopes for life. He doesn’t mind that a van is passing the bus, blaring through loudspeakers a deafening voice:

  On every block, a Committee.

  In every neighborhood, Revolution…

  A woman who is nearing fifty, squat and fat, sweating profusely and carrying an ancient General Electric fan in her free hand, maintains her balance with difficulty and looks at Victorio with eyes in which complicity mingles with hatred, self-pity, sadness, fury, tenderness, resignation, and, in a single phrase, she sums up what perhaps everyone there is thinking: “Damn, it isn’t easy.”

  “No, it isn’t easy.” Here’s a phrase, Victorio reasons, that is recited in Cuba with the same frequency that people like to swear, “Hell, it’s hot!” Two phrases that, for that matter, are often teamed together: It Isn’t easy, buddy, this kinda heat isn’t easy.

  “It isn’t easy.” A phrase that can be pronounced at any time, under any circumstances. It isn’t easy, if you decide to go to the movies, to church, to a party, to court, to the drugstore, to the corner store, to a Santería ceremony, to the hospital, to the Almendares park, to a bar, to a photography studio, to the farmers’ market, to stroll down the street, along the beach, under the fierce blows of the sun, and try to soothe your burning skin. It isn’t easy — my God, it isn’t easy — if you decide to wait endlessly for something: a bus (a camel), a warning, electricity, a rainstorm, a letter, a boat, a piece of news, a friend, a clap of thunder, nostalgia, a bribe, a caress, an airplane, spring (which has never existed), winter (likewise), an advantage, a memory, a lover, a smile, a low blow, a carrier pigeon, envy, secrets, slander, a dart, a denunciation, death.

  “It isn’t easy” If you are waiting for something but you don’t know for sure what it is.

  “It isn’t easy.” Waiting for waiting’s sake, that is, waiting without expectations, that is, hoping without hope, not a drop of it, nothing to expect, nothing to hope for.

  He doesn’t go straight to the theater. He is afraid of being followed. So he walks down toward the sea. For a while he makes long detours; he sits in a park. It is a park that was improvised on the site where a famous bookstore once stood. He knows it’s dangerous. He is too tired. Despite the late hour, a group of small children is playing here. One of the little boys is a traitor and is about to be shot by firing squad. The other kids line him up against the wall of the building next door and fire at him with their wooden rifles, bam bam bam! The boy falls down while the others jump with glee.

  Victorio doesn’t know how long he has waited in the park. The kids have left. The silence that falls is so exact that he can see it coming, touch it, cold as a dead man’s skin. This is the time for lustful, desperate couples, for drinkers of rum, for police.

  There is something shoddy, cardboardlike, about the way the street looks. The worm-eaten walls that passing years have undone, the salt deposited by too many tides and sea breezes, the rusty foundations exposed to view, the moldy beams, the respectable tombstones (pul-vis es et in pulverem reverteris), are all as graceful and as shameless as the painted walls used on the commercial, profit-seeking, horrendous stage. Equally artificial, the light consists of only what the moon can give: artificial; a reflection of some other light. A legitimate metaphor, Victorio thinks, would be “the mirror of the moon illuminates the street like the footlights of a run-down theater.”

  The heat lulls and is capable of causing confusion. The heat in this part of the world is the best hallucinogen. Even his skin, the cotton of his shirt, gleam when they come in contact with the scanty light, the one-act-comedy light of the moon.

  Victorio sweats, and breathes in the odor emanating from his underarms. He constantly tries to dry the palms of his hands on his pants, and only manages to get them damp more quickly. He bends over, picks up a rock, and throws it far away, toward the overgrown lot where, years ago, a building was to have been constructed. He throws the rock with the affected movements of a major league pitcher. That’s what memories are, he says or thinks, rocks that we throw as far away as we can. Life must be to turn each memory into a powerful home run. Fine, a rage for phrases: we human beings are ridiculous, so what can you do?

  Violins are playing. Sometimes just one; sometimes a violin ensemble. What are they performing? Victorio doesn’t know, he can’t identify it. He likewise hears voices singing. The street is empty. It’s the dead of night. Not even the usual police are about. The violins and the singing reinforce the loneliness of the street, while the loneliness of the street exaggerates the sound of violins and singing.

  An eclectic building, never before seen, becomes visible before Victorio’s eyes, as if this were one of Don Fuco’s magic acts: white-gray-blue-yellowish, ornate, crammed full of perilous balconies and pointless windows. Dirty. Ornate. Havana. Very Havana, this dirty, ornate building. There is an air of Paris, of Barcelona, of Cadiz about it: in other words, of Havana. Tall columns and covered walkways, there to protect the hapless passerby from the harshness and excesses of the heartless sun and heat and mist. The facade displays several doors; some of them — most of them — are not original. What is original and what isn’t in this city? Four, five closed doors. Only the sixth is open, and it leads to a staircase. Like any other staircase in Havana, this one is narrow, dark, steep, perfect for a film about murder and mystery. Damp and stifling, smelling of the various odors associated with food, secretions, gases from the street, humidity, sleep, grease, urine, time. Despite the darkness, Victorio can see the peeling paint on the walls, the humid stains, the dirty old marble steps that were once white. Between the smooth-worn handrail of precious wood and the staircase steps, there stretches a sumptuous border of tiles from Seville that look like they were just unpacked.

  Dirty, downtrodden, unpainted, worn out, exhausted, Havana tries to rise back up. Her head held high, very high; her gaze firm, unwavering; discouraged and unwavering. It doesn’t matter if her body is tumbling down. Havana is like an old empress, bereft of wealth and bereft of empire, who still clutches on to her majesty and the value of her long-gone memories, her long-gone power.

  His feet rapidly grow used to calculating the distance that they need to rise from one marble step to the next. His hands are only good for making sure he doesn’t lose his balance. One hand, his left, caresses the wall; the other, his right, holds on to the handrail. His sense of smell tells him that he is coming closer and closer to a community of women and men. His ears can hear the violin and singing voices more clearly every second.

  He reaches the first landing: he has left the street behind and the darkness here is total. The second flight of stairs begins to smell of herbs and flowers. A cologne, Sietepotencias, mixed with herbs and flowers. Victorio is sweating more and more. It’s the heat. Climbing the stairs, too. The staircase seems almost vertical. From the dark, into the dark. On every floor, the doors and windows look locked shut. Is nobody here? Same with the last floor, where, unlike on the others, a cool gallery opens onto a central patio in which royal palms are growing. Victorio thinks: he is standing, for the first time, on a level with the spreading plumage of royal palms.

  At the end of the corridor that opens up to the right there is a spiral staircase. Made of the finest wood, with gorgeous, daring, unbelievable details carved by master carpenters who have not managed to outlive their own refinements. The staircase must be over a hundred years old. And here it is, intact, as if time held no authority over it. At a certain point, the staircase opens up toward a row of balconies, which are also made of finely carved and excessively ornate wood.

  There is a large, well-lighted room. Fifteen or twenty women are singi
ng, all dressed in white, with white mantillas, white lace, white silk, white turbans, white handkerchiefs, white shoes, white stockings, sitting on little wicker rocking chairs. Wearing perfume. Fanning themselves with white fans. The perfume is stirred up, becoming stronger or weaker with each movement of the fans. The room is full. A little farther off, a group of men. All wearing impeccable cotton twill, linen, or wool suits, white as white. Suits from many years ago that have been conserved with perseverance inside wardrobes in which lavender plants have been hanging. Their shirts are also white and retain the body that starch once gave them. Everyone is smoking. Not just the men; the women, too: the oldest women are savoring enormous Havana cigars that give off a bluish smoke whose quality seems unreal. They smoke and relish it. They smoke as if nothing else mattered in the world. They observe the cigar between their fingers in the same way you might observe the relics of a saint. They turn it over. They look at it as if it held some extraordinary secret. Then they bring it to their lips with expert slowness. They savor the smoke. Their heads uplifted. Their eyes closed. How delicious! Only a real Cuban, Victorio thinks, could savor a cigar so voluptuously.

  In the center of a room stands a table laden with sweets. And beyond it, a magnificent altar, decked in lily-white lace tablecloths, tablecloths done in Richelieu embroidery, hemmed in buttonhole stitching, tablecloths with festooned trim. The altar is covered with burning candles and white flowers — amaryllis, mariposas, gardenias, asters, jasmines — as well as plates of sweets, ex-votos, little bells, sepia-toned photographs in frames that must have once been gilded. In the center, tall, full-sized, immaculate, escorted by black cherubs and two palm leaves: Obbatalá, the Virgin of Mercy, Her dress long, Her hands held tight, and Her benevolent face — which looks as if it could not have been carved from wood — serene. At Her pious, magnanimous feet are the fiddlers.

  Victorio makes it up the last few steps of the spiral staircase. Everyone turns to look. The women rise from their rocking chairs, which continue rocking. The fiddlers stop playing. Victorio feels all their stares stabbing into his skin like darts. The fiddlers are the first to react: they return to their instruments, and again the melodies for Obbatalá are heard while the singing resumes, and the rest of those present light candles and kneel. Only one black nonagenarian with blue eyes and long, limp white hair draped over his shoulders, wearing a guayabera, twill pants, and two-toned shoes, supporting himself with a cane that isn’t a cane but a wild stick, conies up to Victorio and gestures to him with a trembling hand that he should follow. The old man stops before the altar. He takes Victorio’s right hand and raises it. A young woman, scarcely more than a girl, whose head is covered by a mantilla and whose cheeks are as white as her mantilla and her dress, whose arms are covered with bracelets, brings a pewter basin into which water, powdered eggshell, perfume, and flower petals have been poured. She dips a branch of jasmine into the perfumed water. They sweep the wet branch over Victorio’s now naked torso. He enjoys having the girl moisten his torso. He smiles at the Virgin of Mercy, he flirts with Her: “Hey, beautiful, bless you, Ob-batalá, mother of us all.”

  It’s the dead of night. To the sound of violins and more violins, the women are singing,

  Blessed is he that comes

  in the name of the Lord…

  The days grow shorter and shorter, the harshness of the daylight dwindles. The sea breeze begins to threaten, sweetly yet vigorously, and to stir the unseen, blurry gray sea. Winter is beginning, that is, the euphemism that in Havana has always been known as “winter.” For a few days at least, you can breathe. Horizon and coastline let you look at them directly, without dazzling you too much, and every day there are fewer children who head down in the afternoon, after school, to romp on the Malecón.

  He tries to sleep on the floor, next to the relics, on a pallet of blankets, in the dressing room of Anna Pavlova, the Great One. Beside him, Salma and Don Fuco give themselves over to serenity and the luster of their own exhaustion. Salma is wearing a gauze dress spangled with tiny stars and colored beadwork. There must be something cheery in her dream, because a smile steals across the tranquil expression on her distant face. Don Fuco is dozing in the usual white robe and the ancient, ridiculous Shylock cap, and you can tell he is sleeping because he isn’t moving, simply because of that, since there is no other difference between the sleeping clown and the waking clown.

  Victorio, on the other hand, is restless: he has slept, and awakened, and fallen asleep again, and awakened again. Over his forty-something years, he has rarely been granted the good fortune of a beneficial sleep. During these last nights of the year 2000, his sleep crisis has grown markedly worse. He goes from the shock of wakefulness to the shock of nightmares, and from nightmares once more to the wicked glimmerings of wakefulness, without always knowing for certain on which side of sleep he finds himself.

  He gets up. He envies Salma and Don Fuco, who, he is certain, are dreaming of the astral plane. Victorio rises from the floor and from the rags and netting that compose his bed in the dressing room of Anna Pavlova, the Great One. He is half naked, half awake. He leaves sleep behind.

  He goes to the window. The only mystery of night is that it holds no mysteries. The sea is even darker than the night; it is a prolonged nonexistence, out beyond the wall. A wall named Malecón, much as it might have been called Jetty, Breakwater, Seawall. A wall that has often been given symbolic connotations, such as the Havana native trapped on the Island, the Havana native facing the sea, the man watching the horizon, the man looking nostalgically into the distance, waiting for revelations and messages. What is sure as can be about this wall is that all it’s good for is enjoying the cool, putting up with impossibly hot nights, and for joining bodies; that is, for putting up better with the heat of the climate and heat of your body Right now, for example, there’s a couple kissing desperately, and more desperately still, touching each other as if they each wanted to be sure of the other’s existence. A policeman — a real presence if ever there was one — strolls down the wide sidewalk and, at a certain point, when he is closest to the couple, it is as if he too has become part of the libidinous duo: a relationship is suddenly created between the police and the pair, for a matter of just a few seconds, true; yet there’s no doubt that, if not their bodies, at least their three energy fields are mingling shamelessly, with the promiscuity that is no myth, no mere symbol in this city where the first, last, the only thing that matters is to mate, to bang, to shack, to screw, to fuck and fuck. In appearance, the policeman continues on his beat, at his martial pace, in his neat uniform and severe boots, while the couple keeps kissing, and everything around the couple, including the wall, the sea, the policeman, and the night, seems to depend upon their union.

  Distant rays of lightning brighten the horizon and the night. Is this all? Is this the world? Is it really morning now in Australia?

  He can’t turn on the lights — his two companions would wake up. He limits himself to lighting the big candle that Don Fuco uses, and it turns out that the candle gives off little light. Its insecure and feeble flame serves only to keep him from falling into the nearest hole, and perhaps to help him plan his next step. If there is no light, there is no theater, thinks Victorio as he faces the impassible darkness of what he imagines must be the orchestra seating. He can’t tell where the tomb of Giselle is. The piano, however, that much he can find, because the piano is a white, lovely patch in the midst of shadows.

  He hears thunder. Above the stage, the staccato of a few raindrops, hitting the roof like stones, which in a few seconds turn into a full-blown rainstorm. The flashes of lightning slip in through the cracks in the roof. Victorio knows that in this part of the world known as the Greater and Lesser Antilles, storms can be truly intense and insistent, and can make men lose their senses. He is ignorant of the scientific truth that hides behind this pronouncement, because he is unaware of the fact that, in general, the reality of these lands mocks all truths, whether legal, scientific, religiou
s, or profane. The Antilles are islands, thinks Victorio, where the gods decided to die, and the devils are trying to live forever.

  Victorio is walking through the theater and waiting for something and not knowing what. He feels that the theater is moving like a boat adrift. He has always had this perception, since his childhood, when they should have closed all the doors and windows, sealed them up with stone and mortar, due to the intensity of the storms.

  As in his contemptible little room on Calle Galiano, now, too, he is waiting for something. A miracle? A catastrophe?

  The rain makes the silence of the theater more powerful or more solemn. This is a moment when the theater does not belong to Havana, or to Cuba, or to anything; it is a place or a hallucination outside of time and space.

  The rainstorm is bursting energetically, torrentially, definitively it is the closest thing to the Deluge ever conceived by the deceased gods and the brutally surviving devils of the cursed island.

  Sitting in the orchestra, Victorio remains quiet, calm, motionless, as if he were waiting for something. Miracle or disaster, it’s all the same. And isn’t it true that any locked door becomes an unknown, screaming be opened? That, at least, is what Victorio thinks, or says; and he laughs at himself, because he is well aware that a locked door proposes something much more simple and immediate: nothing other than to keep you from entering, from looking, from being tempted. Such as, for example, the dressing room doors. The locked doors to the dressing room of Lorenzo the Magnificent and the dressing room of the Guignol. He is moved more strongly than ever by his curiosity to enter the only place in the ruined theater that Don Fuco has taken the precaution of forbidding to them.